12nm AMD Ryzen ‘Pinnacle’ CPUs to arrive in February

In five months time we expect to see the first refresh of the highly regarded AMD Ryzen processor line. We first heard confirmation that AMD would begin to move its CPUs and GPUs to a new 12nm LP process in H1 2018 at the GlobalFoundries Technology Conference (GTC 2017) in Santa Clara, California last week. Now, Taiwanese IT industry journal DigiTimes has squeezed a date from its motherboard making sources – AMD’s ’12LP’ (12nm Leading-Performance) Ryzen processors will launch in February, it says.

If you remember the roll out of AMD Ryzen processors starting earlier this year; we got out hands on the high end Ryzen 7 parts first (in March), followed by Ryzen 5 in April/May, before Ryzen 3 CPUs started to ship towards the end of July. The process refreshed CPUs will follow a similar, but tighter, rollout pattern. According to the source, February will see CPUs codenamed Pinnacle 7 released, with AMD following up with Pinnacle 5 and Pinnacle 3 in March. That’s not all; DigiTimes adds that AMD will intro low-power of Pinnacle processor versions in April 2018, and the enterprise version Pinnacle Pro in May 2018.

With motherboard makers being the source of the above info, it’s not surprising to find out they also had some knowledge of corresponding chipset rollouts. The source says that 400 series chipsets, designed by ASMedia, will become available in March next year. The first boards available will sport X470 or B450 chipsets. AMD and its partners expect the CPU refresh to be popular.

Looking back at last week’s news again, from the GlobalFoundries Technology Conference, we should also be seeing some refreshed Vega GPUs using 12LP. Sadly, further solid detail about any refreshed AMD GPUs has yet to arrive.